Nereid
arms octiply, ink sprays and I serpent you. You thinkyou
win when I grow still, allow penetration to stillnessat
the center. It's called foreplay, Peleus. You nevereven
knew what it was you grasped. Still,I have Achilles,
fruit of pathosand transformation. I dippedhim in
Styx, my hand-printon his ankle a reminderthat at
the centersomething stillis permeable.

Djinn

She
was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary
and burning like the sands.--Honore de Balzac, Passion
in the Desert

What
would happen, I wonder, if I let you place your handon
my fur, my sheathed claw, my muscled flank, or ifI
killed a gazelle and shared, gave you belly, groomed
you,sliced you open, dragged you up into a tree for
later;animal, god, theriomorph, djinn,would you
recognize yourself?

A
Traditional Zen Story

A story
must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself.
--Martin Buber

There were
tigers in the woods. They didn't tell me this at first,so
when one of them startled me with its white teeth, its
insatiablehunger, I ran. It chased, of course, being a
predator: running justproves you are prey, but they didn't
tell me this either. I was young,didn't know better yet.
Anyway, I ran. I came to a cliff, a sheer faceplummeting.
The tiger's paws made no sound, soft and giantas they were,
but the earth shook beneath them. I slid over the edge,bounced
the face, scraping rocks too small to grip, bleeding,
seekingpurchase. At last, a vine. It held my grip, and when
I could breathe,I looked up: the tiger's face hung there,
twenty feet above, a supernovaof fur and hot, panting life,
its hunger visible on every breath. I lookedbelow, to find a
way down: tigers down there as well, circlingon great pads
and oceans of muscle. They were an extremityof beauty, all
those tigers: no one told me that, either. Oh, some thingswe
have to learn, and at the least convenient moments. The vineI
was holding began to give out, of course. It was a small
vine,and there were two mice chewing it, which didn't
help--one was black, one was white. The masters told me
laterthey represented yin and yang, but at the time I didn't
know that,and it wouldn't have helped much, anyhow; the
point was,I was going to fall, or I was going to climb, and
either way,tigers. So, I looked more closely at the vine the
mice and Iso dearly loved, and right there in front of me
was (yes,you know this one) a strawberry. So I ate it. And
that,my friend, is the end of the story, except thatit
was sweet.

Jessamyn
Smyth's short story "A More Perfect Union" in
AmericanLetters and
Commentary Issue 17 (November 2005) has been nominated for
The Pushcart Prize. "Dancer" was recently released in
For Here or To Go: Stories from the Service Industry
(Garret County Press, 2004), and her prize-winning short story
"Blue Plastic Menorah" appeared in Jewish Education
News, Spring 2004. Her short one-act plays "Main Street
Love Song," "Wolves," "Wake," and
"Paper Moon" have been produced by Naked Theatre in
Northampton and at The Paul Alexander Gallery in 2004-2005, and
her poetry and essays appear in various print and electronic
journals. Her play "The Importance of Being Wild" was
the first commissioned work produced by The Shea Theater, and
premiered in 2004; it was reprised with Boston's Playwright's
Platform in 2005. Her play "Jenny Haniver" will hit
The Shea Theatre stage in March of 2006, at the Second Annual
Playwright's Festival of New Works. Smyth is a 2004 grant
recipient of the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. She writes in
several genres, is the Executive Producer of Basilisk
Productions in Western Massachusetts, teaches writing and
occasionally directs other people's plays. She earned her MFA at
Goddard College.

Copyright
2005, Corey Mesler. This work is protected under the U.S.
copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or
altered without the expressed written permission of the author.